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February 20, 2012

I’ve never seen it quite so clear Posted by Abi Sutherland at 01:40 PM *

I know it’s not the dark, ominous dystopian future because humans are their own masters. No one’s work is doled out automatically by a computer via synchronous API1 with SLA2, particularly not as part of a parallel processing array.

Was staggered recently to learn just how small the components on microprocessors are. I mean, I knew they were small, but I didn't realise that, at least for 2-dimensional chips, we're getting close to running out of atoms. Moore's Law actually describes something miraculous that's entirely a human endeavour, not a law of nature. Miracles continue to happen.

As soon as a computer can do something, we cease to believe that the task requires actual intelligence—it was big news when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, but now my laptop is grandmaster-strength. When I was a kid, Searle's Chinese Room seemed impossible to implement (leaving aside the question of actual intelligence in the room), and now it doesn't. Dragon Dictate works. Good Old-Fashioned AI sometimes seems as retro as moon landings, but we're building silicon brains, module by module, and I kind of hope it will all suddenly fit together very quickly.

If I were an astroturf magnate I'd be doing some serious research on the side to see if trolling could be mechanized: it's a more reliable way of screwing with online debate. Bland friendly automated comments quoting the last sentence or two of the previous post, quibbling with a definition and occasionally throwing in a diverting reference to Palestine or declawing cats. I tell you, it's a goldmine.

The stem cells used to grow meat were, as you'd expect, bovine, and not human. So no Soylent Green issue here, nor any reason to raise the ethical ire of folks who object to the use of human embryonic stem cells. (Though vegetarians might still object.)

The development that scares me is when they hook up the facial analysis to the emotive robots that Picard (Dr. Rosalind, not Captain Jean-Luc) is designing at MIT. Then we'll have the full feedback loop: detect human's emotional state, speak and behave so as to modify it to the desired state. Remember Jack Williamson's Humanoids? Well, when they're really here they'll not only be able to run our civilization, but they can make us love them for it. Or whoever's running them.

Bruce Cohen, STM @12: there was a science fiction story where information was stored with a single bit being a notched neutrino, so there's actually still a lot of potential room going smaller. Now if only we could get the darned things to slow down enough to hang around, or figure out how to use a memory array that moves at light-speed....

We know what forces to use to manipulate electron or nucleon locations and spins to create metastable states we can read out, usually electromagnetic or plasmonic fields. We have no idea how to manipulate neutrinos, which have no charge or color force. Light-speed isn't a problem; there are computational systems that use photons for storage. That's (relatively) easy because they are electromagnetic forces (when that's what we're trying to measure).

The trick with photons is either to let them fly, but control where they go, so they bounce back and forth between mirrors a few million times, or to slow them down. The record is a few meters per second, IIRC. But there's not even a theory about how to do either of those things with neutrinos.

Here's a YouTube video of the jetpack guy in 2006. It used to have the "Greatest American Hero" theme as a soundtrack (which was absolutely perfect), but now there's a notice saying "Audio Not Available" -- I guess somebody griped.

marc, #7: I was thinking more of Clarke's "Food of the Gods"...

Steve, #11: They are careful to say that "none of the data gathered is stored", but I would frankly be amazed if something wasn't being done with it to improve the recognition process. That would just be too good an opportunity for random input processing to pass up.

JMO, #16: That won't make any difference to the people marc was talking about. "Stem cells" is a magic-word phrase; as he notes, it's one of the codes for "abortion" in batshit-crazyland, and that's all that matters.

#17 yes, this vegetarian would object strongly to test tube meat. Yuck. I will happily stick to tofu. And I hope that all derived from meat products, whether gene spliced into a papaya or grown in a vat, are clearly labeled so I can avoid.

The advantage of vat grown meat isn't that a vegetarian might eat it (though there might be people with religious issues, like Hindus, who would), because it is still meat. But it could be grown much more efficiently than an animal is, perhaps even on the photosynthesis of algae or an artificial photosynthetic system. If it were as cheap as growing soy or red beans it could be a reasonable protein source for large parts of the human population that don't get sufficient protein now.

Also note that vat-growth of fish has been demonstrated in the lab, and I don't think that growing mollusk or arthropod tissue in a vat would be difficult. I wouldn't mind a diet including lobster and squid, and I could probably get used to the occasional tarantula steak.

The religious and political objections to stem cells are another issue entirely, and if they prevent the development of vat-grown meat in the US, while not being considered valid in places like India or Africa, I don't think the human race as a whole will be seriously affected (but I surely wouldn't want to be a poor person in the US anytime in the next 50 years or so).

I don't know the current provisions, but in the Cold War they had airfields with the aircraft hangars tunnelled into mountains, and aircraft suspended by cables from the roof as a reserve. Those crazy secret bases that Bond villains had in the movies: the Swiss built them.

The US military is (roughly) ten times the size of the Swiss military. The US is (actually fairly exactly) forty times the size of Switzerland. (Both comparisons by population.)

So yes, they have an air force. They're a very heavily-armed country. Evidently the Swiss Air Force keeps banker's hours, though: "A report in the Swiss news magazine FACTS reveals that the Swiss Air Force provides ready-to-takeoff aircraft only during office hours on working days. The air force staff declared that, due to financial limits, they are not operational all the time."

(It makes sense if you think about it: what, someone is going to fly across all of France without the French Air Force doing anything about it, and suddenly Switzerland will need to scramble fighters to shoot them down? Even if that happened, there's not enough of Switzerland to shoot them down between the time they enter Swiss airspace and the time they reach launch range. Hell, if they're attacking Geneva or Zurich, launch range comes before the border.)

Ha ha ha. Given that they want quite strongly (if perhaps not quite as strongly as during the Cold War) to remain neutral, they have to look to their own defence - no one else will! (Also the reason Sweden had the world's fourth largest air force for a while during the early 50s.)

Dave Luckett #29: The Brenner Pass (Passo del Brennero) connects Austria to Italy, it doesn't connect either Austria or Germany to Switzerland. If Goering had marched half a million men over the Brenner Pass, Mussolini would have been, ahem, molto sorpresato.

Bruce Cohen #26: PZ Meyers was pretty down on vat-grown meat, basically arguing that you have to break down its food to basic nutrients, physically support it, manage fluids, control temperature and protect it from pathogens, and doesn't a chicken do all that "for free"?

I could see the argument going either way, but to me a key issue is that the bigger the facility, the bigger the possible problems. On the other hand, we already have agribusiness' factory farms feeding salmonella into the food supply.... Then too, I'd want to see an accounting of the respective energy and water inputs... the vat is liable to involve a lot of electrical energy, more if it cleans and recycles it's own water.

Unfortunately it appears that the things that make us weak and strange are NOT being engineered away.

Re vat-grown meat as a protein source for the poor: why is it that proposed solutions to poverty and hunger so often involve extreme high-tech that can neither be produced or maintained by those same poor hungry people? Wouldn't a combination of chicken coop and vegetable garden (waste from each serving as input for the other) be more feasible? Not to mention not leaving the poor at the mercy of, e.g., Monsanto.

Lila @39 -- I've thought about that, too, but I see some potential problems with more people keeping animals for food. A larger proportion of the population than ever lives in urban areas, under fairly to extremely crowded conditions. Also, lots of those people have no prior experience raising animals (this goes for people at all educational and social levels), maybe for several generations. So there would be immense hygiene problems, I think, as well as the danger of some very nasty, contagious flu or something mutating and spreading due to the close proximity of humans and animals.

At the very least, some massive investment in education and space allocation would be necessary. Not saying it's not worth doing! I'm all for low-tech, creative self-sufficiency. Just that it would take careful implementation. (Maybe there are already ongoing programs like this, I'm just not aware of them.)

Zeppelins - The Airship Ventures zeppelin's main base is at Moffett Field, across the freeway from me here in Silicon Valley, though it spends about half the year in other cities. I often see it cruising around in the evening, or as I'm driving to work. And in spite of all the economic downturn and other troubles of the last decade, it's really cheerful having something as amazingly silly as tourist zeppelins flying around, reminding us that it's really The Steampunk Retro Future. (The future's pretty cool!. Also.) And they share their building with Singularity University.

They're no longer advertising 23&Me - they've been the Farmers Insurance zeppelin for a couple of years.

Lila #39: Other things being equal central production is likely to be more efficient, (at least before transportation), while distributed production will be more resilient. Currently, our business climate is all about efficiency....

Also, even more cynically: because then the investors couldn't make as much money off them....

That's what I've seen as well, including from the so-called "wingers" I've noticed. For instance, the article on Santorum linked from #23 doesn't actually mention stem cells, but in a 2005 interview, Santorum stated that he supports types of stem cell research that don't involve the destruction of human embryos. (He does somewhat bobble the distinction between embyronic and other pluripotent stem cells in the interview, but at least it's clear that he sees ethical distinctions between different types of stem cell use, as did the recent Bush administration.)

For the same reason that the undeveloped world needs a new design for stoves that don't kill so many people in fires or emit so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. At this point any solutions to our long-term climate, energy supply, and raw material supply problems have to be global, and they have to scale well. That doesn't necessarily mean centralizing all production (in fact, it may mean decentralizing a lot of things, like power generation), but it does mean that even completely distributed technology (and, yes, wood-burning stoves and small flock chicken ranches are technologies) need to be designed with the global issues in mind.

David Harmon @ #43, you mean like in CAFOs? So instead of spreading small amounts of manure on your hayfields you end up with this?

Centralized food production involves a hell of a lot of input of fossil fuels, even before you get to transporting that food to the consumer. It also typically involves degradation of the soil and water over time. In order to measure efficiency, these things need to be taken into account, and too often they're not.

(Debbie @ #41, I agree there are problems with untrained people keeping animals. But bioengineering facilities?)

PZ Meyers was pretty down on vat-grown meat, basically arguing that you have to break down its food to basic nutrients, physically support it, manage fluids, control temperature and protect it from pathogens, and doesn't a chicken do all that "for free"?

Well, I haven't seen PZ's post, but it seems to me that the chicken's services are far from free. The chicken will insist on growing a substantial part of its biomass into head, feathers, bones, and other inedible or nearly inedible parts. And then after all that it needs protection from pathogens too!

Whether that turns out to be more or less costly than vat growing may be questionable, but the chicken has plenty of overhead.

31
I spent a year building solid-state microwave delay lines. Mostly for radar altimeters, but there was the batch of one-microsecond delay lines going into goose-collar radio transmitters as oscillators, 'because geese can't carry the big packages that alligators can'.

Even if I wanted to the 800 year lease for the land on which my small terraced house stands forbids me from doing all kinds of things that might disturb the neighbours with noise and smells. This includes the keeping of chickens and pigs and the making of tallow candles as well as rather more appealing activities like the cooking up of boiled sweets. Growing my own meat in a vat would presumably be allowed. Well not actually my own meat, I do bite my nails but one would have to draw the line somewhere.

Lila @ 39: Why is it that proposed solutions to poverty and hunger so often involve extreme high-tech that can neither be produced or maintained by those same poor hungry people?

I think this question contains its own answer.

Also, if the high-tech could somehow be so produced or maintained, draconian IP claims or expensive operator licensing or gold-plated 'precautionary' regulations would certainly be necessary to restore the locus of agency to properly qualified persons, with properly qualified connections and properly qualified bank accounts.

I have no idea why that posted twice, but does this error message shed any light? "Publish failed: Renaming tempfile '/home/pnh/public_html/makinglight/archives/013610.html.new' failed: Renaming '/home/pnh/public_html/makinglight/archives/013610.html.new' to '/home/pnh/public_html/makinglight/archives/013610.html' failed: No such file or directory"

Historically, uses have been found for pretty much every part of the chicken. The fact that we now (for certain narrow values of "we" and "now") regard so much of the chicken as waste material says more about us than it does about the chicken.

At this point any solutions to our long-term climate, energy supply, and raw material supply problems have to be global, and they have to scale well. That doesn't necessarily mean centralizing all production (in fact, it may mean decentralizing a lot of things, like power generation), but it does mean that even completely distributed technology (and, yes, wood-burning stoves and small flock chicken ranches are technologies) need to be designed with the global issues in mind.

I am beginning to doubt there is anything that is truly "global," and while I like the idea of being able to make things better, everywhere, something in this "we'll make global, scalable solutions," sounds like another "we know best, we'll fix it for you" assumption of western cultural superiority.

I am reminded of the Kipling story "William the Conqueror," which is based in part on Kipling's experiences in India. There is a famine and the English government goes in to save the day with shipments of wheat and millet. But the natives of India, used to rice, don't know how to prepare wheat and millet and refuse "these strange hard grains that choked their throat," and the British on the ground and in the field must come up with their own solutions and adaptations to save the natives.

History seems full of disasters from misapplied "global" solutions that don't take into account global variance and conditions.

Sorry, maybe the word "global" has too many tangential connotations tacked on to it. I'm not talking about single solutions for every situation; I'm talking about solution sets that are compatible, and which are maintained by compensation schemes that aren't perverse.

For instance, in the US many western states took a simple, local solution to air polution: let the predominantly westerly winds blow it towards the eastern states. Clearly not a good global solution, though it worked as a local solution as long as the eastern states didn't impose some consequences.

The human population is high enough now that even a very small footprint per individual is multiplied to the level of affecting the global climate, and there's effectively a single (albeit very complex) airshed and watershed: it all comes back to haunt us all.

Even low-tech solutions can have large-scale effects over long periods of time1. The climate and ecosystem of the Australian continent, for instance, has probably been changed over the last 50,000 years of human habitation, especially by the practice of "fire-stick farming"2.

1. OK, we could promise not to stick around for very long. I doubt we can get the whole human race to stick to that promise, though it more and more seems to be the default outcome.
2. Yes, this is now being disputed by some scientists; I would be surprised if there had been no effect, however. As the joke goes, I think we're just negotiating the price.

Seems like it'd be much more effective if you didn't have to haul around the hose-full of water. Definite diminishing returns problem; the higher you're flying, the more hose you have to haul. ("But how else would you get the water into the jets?" "Uh....")

Couple of interesting failure modes suggest themselves: ingestion of unsuspecting cephelapod? Flying high enough that the hose intake comes out of the water?

The Learjet? Originally designed for the Swiss Air Force, and a failure--it crashed several times as I remember it. William Powell Lear realized that the plane design was good but the wing cross-section was probably the worst ever used for a small jet, bought the manufacturing rights, and went to work with a *lot* of Bondo on the test model before committing to the final airfoil design.

It was a remarkably tense session -- I guess the prospect of reducing the amount of meat in one's diet cuts a little close to the bone for developed world people.

Anyway, it's still very far away from becoming a common instalment in people's lives, and if your goal is to reduce meat consumption, more traditional and lower tech ways are likely to remain the norm for at least some time.

In Yiddish, shanda (also spelled shonda and shandeh) means shame. It's a pretty awful thing to name a kid; I literally flinched when I saw your post. (got the joke, but the flinch was my first reaction.)